Iconic Westwood turns out pretty vacant REVIEWS
WESTWOOD: PUNK, ICON, ACTIVIST
A documentary by Lorna Tucker. Rating unavailable
Unlike the glamorous movers 2
and shakers generally profiled in fashion documentaries, Vivienne Westwood has never been haute couture. She’s not part of any conglomerate and has always run her own show. This sometimes snarky doc reflects that sense of independence, right down to the scant scrutiny it pays to areas its subject doesn’t want examined.
Director Lorna Tucker is a former model who worked for Westwood, and might be too respectful of the latter’s boundaries. At a mere 80 minutes, Westwood is unnecessarily thin on context, and this is mostly down to the streetwise designer herself, now 77, who tends to say she “can’t be bothered” to many kinds of questions. (With her elaborate turbans and oversized glasses, Westwood could be mistaken for one of Tracey Ullman’s affectionately outlandish creations.)
Westwood came from a workingclass family and started out as a primary-school teacher in London. But she made jewellery on the side and sold it on Portobello Road. That’s how she met Malcolm Mclaren, who nurtured an inherent sense of design while breaking up her first marriage and ending her conventional lifestyle.
The late Mclaren, with whom the designer had one still very resentful son, was the Svengali of the Sex Pistols, whose display of Westwood’s tattered clothing made the punk look a worldwide phenomenon. But this period garners roughly three minutes of screen time. Of course, the fact that this Brillo-haired dandy tried to take credit for his partner’s creations and later torpedoed her distribution agreement with Armani might have something to do with that. Elsewhere, there isn’t really enough of her ongoing social engagement to warrant the Activist
part of the title.
The tradeoff is access, and many sequences—of fashion-show preps, or working in her studio with sometimes browbeaten underlings—are incredibly intimate. None more so than those with her husband, Austrian-born Andreas Kronthaler, a former Olympian who initially comes across as a self-absorbed prat. (He’s widely thought to be the inspiration for Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno character.) But subsequent scenes show him to be a full, if even more imperious, creative partner in her enterprise, now busier than ever.
The use of baroque classical music to underscore Dame Vivienne’s decidedly old-school entrepreneurship, razorblades notwithstanding, is one of many touches that make Westwood worth bothering with.
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Hitler built for Germans between 1933 and ’45—a historical period that has been re-created on film perhaps more than any other.
Far less visited is the immediate aftermath. Roberto Rossellini tackled it in the little-seen Germany Year Zero. But that was from the point of view of the vanquished “master race”, reduced to living in rubble and subsisting on black-market trade. Tales of their earlier victims are usually set in the midst of the horror itself. But the melancholy follows a ragtag band of Jewish entrepreneurs—all Holocaust survivors— as they make a go of it in Frankfurt just after the war.
Essentially comic despite the premise, this lovingly crafted, if sometimes overly contrived, effort was adapted by director Sam Garbarski (born in 1948) from a series of novels by Michel Bergmann, who cowrote the screenplay. The movie gives a career-topping role to star Moritz Bleibtreu, better known as daftly punkish characters in The Elementary Particles and Run Lola Run. He plays suave David Bermann, who has lost his family and their small department store to the Nazis. In fact, David only survived Treblinka because of his people skills, with his dry sense of humour catching the ear of the camp commandant, who makes him something of a pet.
Unfortunately, his wheeling-anddealing skills—which now involve selling linens door-to-door at inflated prices—draw the attention of the U.S. army, just beginning its denazification program. David’s story is thus told during initially tense interviews with an American (but German-born) intelligence officer played by the unnecessarily beautiful Antje Traue, who was a cyborglike villain in Man of Steel. She’s after collaborators, even the unintentional kind, so it takes considerable effort and multiple flashbacks to win her over.
Winning people over is what this guy is all about. That’s how he’s able to mobilize a group of men with similar histories, and varying degrees of trauma, into a mobile sales team. Their plan is to raise enough money to catch a boat to the USA, where it’s supposed to be safe. The problem for David is that he still loves his language and the place where he was born—a duality rarely addressed in tales of war and subjugation. His sense of loyalty extends even to a home that hurt him.
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